physicists – Impact Lab

Quantum physicists agree to disagree about the nature of reality

January 15, 2013

Quantum physicists are still very divided on how quantum mechanics is to be interpreted.

Quantum mechanics is real. We wouldn’t have superconductors, lasers, and many forms of computing and cryptography without its microscopically small probabilistic effects. But despite our laboratory certainty, what’s less clear is the role it plays in the fundamental nature of reality. And as a recent survey published by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna has revealed, quantum physicists are still very divided on how it’s to be interpreted.

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Analysis, Business, Science & Technology News

Physicists show gender bias against female job applicants: Study

October 24, 2012

Study reveals gender bias with female job applicants.

A new study in the U.S. has found that researchers assessing the employability of early-career scientists subconsciously favour male students over females. The bias, which was seen to exist in both male and female physicists and was also exhibited by chemists and biologists, is thought to be a contributing factor towards the underrepresentation of women in physics.

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Current Events, Historical Perspectives, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

Physicists add 11 colors to the rainbow by tearing apart atoms

March 29, 2012

New colors found utilizing lasers and ion cascades.

True, the pink is a lie. But a UC Santa Barbara research team has honestly just generated eleven new hues using lasers and ion cascades.

The team created the new colors by aiming a pair of lasers—one high-frequency, the other low-frequency—at a slab of semiconductor material, a gallium arsenide nanostructure. The high-frequency beam separates an electron from its host atom, generating what’s known as an exciton (a bonded pair consisting of a negatively-charged electron and a positively-charged host). The powerful, low frequency wave then accelerates the freed electron, which goes crashing into the electron-less atom in front of it. Since the electron has extra energy from the acceleration when it recombines with the host atom in front of it, that energy is radiated as light. Previously unseen frequencies of light…
Continue reading… “Physicists add 11 colors to the rainbow by tearing apart atoms”